Editor

Tasmania’s Breath of Fresh Air (BOFA) Film Festival in Launceston, is pleased to announce the inaugural 2015 Innovative Tasmania Awards.

The Awards, presented at Tasmania Design Centre Launceston, recognise innovations that have had an impact on Tasmania in any sector of life from past to present day.

The general public, innovators and interested Tasmanians were asked to rate the most innovative idea in the five categories including: Food and Beverage Production; Science, Technology and Transport; Sport, Leisure and The Arts; Politics, Governance and Security and Community and Environment.

Macquarie Barley took out the top prize in the Mouth-Watering Innovations: Food and beverage production category. UTAS Associate Professor Meixue Zhou bred Macquarie Barley to improve its malting quality, disease resistance and yield relative to other local varieties. Supported by the Grains Research and Development Corporation, this distinctively Tasmanian variety will not only be another viable cereal option for growers, but is expected to underpin the development of new boutique beers and whiskeys.

In the Boundary Pushing Innovations: Science, Technology and Transport category, CSIRO snapped up the top award recognised for their Swarm Sensing technology. With honey bee populations in decline, this technology claims to better understand the effects stressors have on bee health and behaviour.

Northern Tasmania Development was recognised for their initiative, NE Mountain Bike Trails in Fun & Fanciful Innovations: Sport, Leisure and The Arts category. Taking out the category’s award, the innovation involves 75km of mountain bike trails, mapping, signage, skills development and marketing to drive regional economic development.

Picking up the award in the Law and Order Innovations: Politics, Governance and Security category was Scantex by University of Tasmania. UTAS has stepped up the fight against counter-terrorism by developing the Scantex technology. Scantex is the first comprehensive instrumentation in the world to be able to detect the full range of explosives, including military, commercial and homemade inorganic and peroxide explosives, overcoming the limitation of existing screening techniques that struggle to detect these inorganic explosives.

It Takes A Village Innovations: Community and Environment winners were Appin Hall Children’s Foundation. Appin Hall is a respite, healing and educational facility for seriously ill and disadvantaged children. Located in a pristine mountain habitat, Appin Hall is unique in that it provides a loving homely environment and not the appearance or approach of an ‘institution’.

A total of 32 nominations were received across the five categories with one winner from each category awarded with a designer trophy made of Tasmanian hand blown glass and a Certificate. Judging was by means of crowd sourcing with almost 2,000 votes cast online by the general public.

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